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The New Yorker on Robin Williams

For all of the coverage of the sad, sad way this world lost the beautiful joy and laughter brought to life by Robin Williams, this article is the most impactful I have come across yet… and with one click, I remember why I love The New Yorker.

“The same qualities that drive a person to brilliance may drive that person to suicide. Highly successful people tend to be perfectionistic, constantly striving to meet impossible standards. And celebrities tend to be hungry for love, for the adoration of audiences. No perfectionist has ever met his own benchmarks, and no one so famished for admiration has ever received enough of it. That untrammelled dynamism that Williams brought to almost every role he played has a questing urgency, as though it were always in pursuit of some truth yet to be named. In public appearances, he never showed the callous narcissism of many actors; his work relied on the interplay between riotous extroversion and nuanced self-study. He played an alien so well because he was an alien in his own mind, permanently auditioning to be one of us. Suicide is a crime of loneliness, and adulated people can be frighteningly alone. Intelligence does not help in these circumstances; brilliance is almost always profoundly isolating.”